Improve Microsoft flight simulator 10 to allow real VRF flying
Microsoft flight simulator X is currently patch to service pack 2 and is a big leap from its original release state. MS FSX was originally developed in mind to give hardware 2 or 3 years out from its release date a real performance work out. Even 5 years later on, if you were to drag all the visual and performance sliders all the way to the right you would suffer big frame rate dips at busy airports.
Microsoft flight simulator 10 was a vast improvement on realism compared to its previous version,
with added pay ware this level realism is improved even more.
The first thing that needs to be done to a default installation of Microsoft flight simulator, this installation of higher resolution terrain meshes. The world as modelled in Microsoft flight simulator is done in 3-D using wire mesh frames. How accurate this wireframe mesh is, will determine how accurately the visual scenery is placed. Mesh data in short contains terrain elevation data for a specific region. This mesh data is used to create a 3d model of terrain features such as hills, mountains, cliffs, plateaus, valleys etc.
The default installation of Microsoft flight simulator uses quite low resolution meshes especially in rural and unpopulated areas. The fidelity of these terrain mesh is directly impacts on your experience as a VFR pilot. If you like to fly low and slow than how accurate those mountains and hills are compared to the real world depends largely on the resolution of those meshes.
For example, the default mesh resolution for the United States in MS FSX is 38.2m. This basically means that the height of the terrain is measured every 38.2m. Enterprising companies have now released terrain mesh is with resolutions as high as 10 m. This means that the resolution of the ground elevation is three times as sensitive to changes in elevation. The difference in the depiction is that instead of terrain features looking smoothed out, mountains will appear craggy and individual subtle terrain differences are better modelled.
The best to start finding mesh updates is on Google. Because the size of terrain mesh is are generally very large, they are split into geographical regions such as America or Europe. You can find meshes as either payed or freeware. In general payed meshes will offer higher resolutions and meshes for more exotic locations. Whether or not you go for free or paid meshes, if you rely on flying by distinct landmarks than a higher resolution mesh becomes your first priority.
Once you have your terrain meshes installed, than the next step is to look at installing some updated texures to make the most of your new higher resolution terrain models. You can either download generic texture updates or even go the route of being real satellite imagery converted for use in MS FSX.
